Only One Year Until World Ends . . .

Scary stories about cataclysmic events caused by asteroids or a runaway planet slamming into planet Earth are hot news today, with many pseudo-scientists and so-called religious leaders predicting doomsday scenarios. But could disaster strike in our lifetime? While there are many potential threats out there, the odds are slim that the end times are really upon us.

The Bible warns in Revelation 8:8: “Something like a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood.” Further, the Mayan calendar cycle comes to an end in 2012, which many people think spells doom.

Will most of us die in 2012? Is there a mysterious Planet X, Nibiru, or some sort of killer star headed toward the Earth right now, likely to hit us by 2012? Apparently not, despite rumors.

There probably is a Planet X in the more classical sense of an unknown planet. The search goes on for this object, which is estimated by an independent-minded astronomer, the late Tom Van Flandern, to be circling the Sun at a distance 50 to 100 times as far out as the Earth (Neptune is 30 times as far from the Sun as is Earth). But this is not what we are talking about: The real Planet X would pose no threat to our home planet. It merely causes minor perturbations to the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.

Comet Elenin did come around, which was supposed (by some) to signal the end of the world, but Elenin broke into bits when it got as near the Sun as the orbit of Saturn, and in any case the fragments will only approach within 2 million miles of the Earth. Another Internet legend bit the dust.

Where do these fright rumors originate? Nancy Lieder and her associates have suggested a worldwide cataclysm may strike the Earth in the near future. The cause, she says, “will be a planet, known to the ancients but as of yet officially undiscovered by modern man, that passes near the Earth as part of its normal 3,600-year orbit.”

Among her associates are Lloyd Pye, who maintains that our mitochondrial DNA goes back only 100,000 years and therefore we must have been concocted at that time by space aliens. Others in her circle include Jason Martell, Mark Hazlewood and James McCanney.

Who is Ms. Lieder? She owns the ZetaTalk website and claims to be in telepathic communication with gray aliens from the Zeta Reticuli binary star system. She calls them Zetas for short. There is no confirmed evidence for any planets around Zeta Reticuli at this time.

Ms. Lieder claims she was mysteriously selected as a communicator of the Zeta message and that they implanted her brain several times with genetic material so that she could be in touch with them telepathically. Maybe she should have her head examined.

She boasts of her ignorance, such as not knowing which end of a telescope to look into. Ms. Lieder claims to have a lock on the truth and says that if any human theory differs from her ideas, it is wrong. Yet she and her Zetas have been wrong again and again. For example, they claimed that comet Hale-Bopp did not exist. She refused to go outside and look at it because, according to her, it was non-existent.

REAL DEATH STARS

Her associate, Mark Hazlewood, denounced her as a con artist. Yet she includes him on her website.

The famous science fiction movie Star Wars: A New Hope played up the manmade Death Star as the ultimate weapon, able to annihilate entire planets. But the real universe is filled with actual death stars. In our solar system alone, according to Flandern, there have been six planetary explosions in the past 4.6 billion years—most recently, just 3.2 million years ago.

If you want to worry about something, worry about the “wolf rayet” star WR 104, a ticking time bomb 8,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius, which has the potential to blast Earth with a powerful jet of gamma rays without warning, possibly frying all life on our planet, except for subterranean bacteria and organisms in deep ocean trenches. It could blast us today, or it could remain quiet for a few hundred thousand years. If it does explode, it could release as much energy in less than an hour as our Sun would give off in its entire lifetime of 10 billion years.

We know asteroids large enough to cause mass extinctions have pelted the Earth before. It was probably one such bolide that wiped out the dinosaurs that ruled Earth for 185 million years. Smaller asteroids and comets have caused the end of the Bronze Age and probably wiped out Clovis Man, an early colonizer of North America, along with the mammoths, mastodons and other megafauna—and smaller animals as well.

Then there is Nemesis, a hard-to-detect dwarf star or “super jupiter” orbiting the Sun at a distance of about 0.8 to 1.5 light years. Nemesis, with a mass from three to 13 times that of Jupiter, was originally postulated in 1984 to explain a perceived cycle of mass extinctions in the geological record that seem to occur approximately once per 26 million years. Nemesis, if it exists, may kill us by kicking a comet into the inner solar system from the hypothetical Oort cloud, a zone where trillions of comets are thought to lurk. A comet may have caused the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908, an explosion in our atmosphere about 1,000 times as powerful as the atom bomb that leveled Hiroshima.

Yes, disaster could strike us at any time, but it probably will not be in 2012.

——John Tiffany is the assistant editor of THE BARNES REVIEW (TBR) magazine of Revisionist history based inWashington, D.C. TBR is $46 for one year (six big issues) inside the United States. To subscribe, call 1-877-773-9077 toll free to charge. If you would like to review a sample issue of TBR, please send $4 to TBR, P.O. Box 15877, Washington, D.C. 20003.

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